Effective Web Navigation To Boost Your Conversion Rates

No matter how good your current conversion rates are, there is always some room for improvement. As they say, little things make a big difference and website navigation is illustrative of this point. Easy browsing experience, logically organized content, and clear design - all these crucial details make a measurable impact on your traffic and conversion.

Umbrella’s solid experience in web development shows that a website that is easy to navigate leads to longer visits and increased conversions. Refusing to invest in an engaging website layout and good structure may cause you losing your ground to more forward-thinking competitors.

Your approach to website navigation depends on your content, target audience, and priorities. Of course, there is no silver bullet and what works for one website isn’t necessarily what will work for your own. But there are certain principles that work for any business field.

Umbrella has chosen 4 essential tips worth to be considered when planning and developing the web navigation that will improve your conversion rate.

Make the site layout logical

The visitors’ experience must be prioritized for higher conversions. An effective navigation system relies on clear guides, logical and well-ordered elements.

One of the ways to avoid a confusing layout is to use the Z-pattern that addresses the core requirements for any effective site: branding, hierarchy, structure, and call to action.

On this site, Umbrella used a Z-pattern which coincides with the natural left-to-right eye movement of a user. At first, a logo grabs the user attention at point 1, then a colorful “Free In-Office Trial” button reinforces the desired eye movement. A Featured Image in the center of the page separates the top section of the design from the bottom, and facilitate eye movement downward, where point 3 encourages title scanning which leads to the “сall-to action” on 4.

Be specific

Avoid overly generic wording in your navigation structure. Always remember that your content should be organized for your target audience, not for you.

Words like “products” or “tools” aren’t clear enough for the user (especially, for a first-timer) and require multiple clicks to determine what content is enclosed. Сonsider your site specifics and use more precise labels that are self-explanatory.

For its own website, Umbrella marked available options with words such as “portfolio”, “technologies” and “blog” to avoid any confusion. That’s how it looks like:

Avoid excessive website features

Data-сonsuming website features have a negative effect on the UX. Large animations and videos take obviously much more time to load than simple text or minimalistic graphics.

Besides that, undue visual elements not only complicate the navigation but also make it more difficult for a web crawler to index the site, which potentially affects the quality of its SEO and the overall search rankings.

One of the textbook examples is homepage sliders. The use of large images and many slides not only slows down the page load time but also has a negative impact on your conversion rate. As the content is not visible all the time, users simply ignore sliders confusing it with an ad or a promotion. Moreover, according to the statistics, only 1% of the people actually click on a slide.

Test a variety of menu styles

There are many navigation styles you can choose from. At the beginning of this article, F-layout was mentioned. But this structure can be implemented in different ways. Many sites may even use more than one style.

Umbrella IT is one of the top mobile app development companies from AppFutura’s directory. The firm developers apps and web projects providing all the infrastructure. They focus on Symfony and Node.JS for the back-end and HTML5 or Twitter bootstrap, among other platforms.